For
its first two decades CARRF operated through a bulletin board located at York
University, Canada. Now CARRF is best accessed by way of the Twitter site kindly organized
by Johannes P. Wheeldon Click Here

To The Minister of Health, the Hon. Allan Rock,
House of Commons, Ottawa, ON., K1A 0A6.

copies to:

The Rgt. Hon. Jean Chretien, Prime Minister
The Hon. Paul Martin, Minister of Finance
The Hon. John Manley, Minister of Industry
The Hon. Ronald Duhamel, Secretary of State for Science
Presidents of Granting Councils
Presidents of Universities.

No increase in medical research budget
without improvements in distribution system.

November 23rd
1998

Dear Minister Rock,

The purpose of this letter to draw your attention to the opinion
of many members of the Canadian research community that it is scientifically pointless and
economically unjustified to increase the budget for medical research without a
simultaneous radical correction of the way research grants are distributed among
researchers.

We, the undersigned members and supporters of the Canadian Association
for Responsible Research Funding (CARRF) understand that a letter writing campaign is
underway wherein members of the scientific community are asking you to increase the level
of funding for medical research through the Medical Research Council (MRC) and other
agencies.

Much as we would appreciate increased levels of funding, we believe
that the acute problems now faced by medical researchers are not due entirely to shortage
of dollars but also to a very
flawed distribution system.
The flaws begin with the process of peer review which is treated as an exact science,
without much allowance for the fact that it is not. The effect of the present peer review
process is to concentrate research funds into the hands of the few, thereby depriving too
many others of an opportunity to deliver their creativity and discovery for the benefit of
Canada and the world.

Researchers who are deprived of the opportunity to do research
represent a serious "internal
brain drain" within
Canada that is much more serious than any brain drain leaving the country. Not only are
such disenfranchised researchers lost to the research enterprise, they also continue to be
paid by their universities for work the present system prevents them from doing -- a
two-fold waste of taxpayers' dollars.

The old adage that "two heads are better than one" still applies.Only in this case we are talking about thousands of
good heads across Canada who cannot deliver the goods for which they are paid because
research funds are literally monopolized by the few who see themselves as the truly
excellent researchers according to their own skewed yardsticks. Thus, simply asking for
more government dollars to further enrich these privileged few will not solve the problem
but rather create a new problem of over-funding and waste.

We believe that the peer review system is generally only good enough to
differentiate between roughly the top two thirds and the bottom third or 1/4 of research
projects. It is not sharp enough to divide the top 20% of researchers from all the rest,
which is how it operates now. On the basis of the present, flawed, distribution system,
you would have to increase funding by up to 500% in order to involve 70-80% of all
qualified applicants. If such increments are out of the question, then the only reasonable
alternative is to radically revise the distribution system in order to make it more
inclusive of Canada's talent pool. One way or another the bulk of qualified researchers
must be brought back into productivity.

Without some pressure to change, the present entrenched system will not
change itself. Its present beneficiaries will see to that. And without changes to the
current distribution system, any new money will, in our judgement, be used inefficiently
and be channeled preferentially to those who are already well funded.

There are realistic and reasonable solutions to our distribution system
such as introduction of basic no-frills research grants, with a system of gradual ranking
instead of the present "all or
none" allocations with sharp
cut-offs that produce zero funding for grant applications below the line that are every
bit as good as those above the line. This system was developed by Donald Forsdyke of
Queens University and the details can be found at: http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/peerrev.htm

We urge your Government to refrain from allocating any new money to the
granting councils in the next federal budget. Instead, the Councils should be asked to
implement a new distribution system based on a broad consensus among researchers,
including the Canadian Association for Responsible Research Funding (

CARRF). No extra funding should be released until the
conditions for proper distribution of such funds are adequately established.

We believe that such a complete overhaul of the research funding system will do more to restore integrity and
effectiveness of Canadian scientific research, than further infusions, at any level, of
the Canadian taxpayers' money.

MRC officials will no doubt brand our view as marginal. Many
researchers are understandably reluctant to speak out. But we assure you that our views
are widely felt within the scientific community, most especially by the 50-70% of
researchers who have been effectively excluded from the practice of research for which
they trained many years and for they still draw salaries.

To this letter we attach an article by A.A.Berezin, G.Hunter,
J.J.Pear, and C.Rangacharyulu, "Canadian
Research Councils need Fundamental Reform", which was published in the Fall 1998 issue of Ontario
Confederation of University Faculty Association (OCUFA) Forum. It provides
more details regarding the defects of the existing funding system and proposes plausible
alternatives. The article in its entirety can also be accessed on the OCUFA web page (Forum, Fall 1998 issue): http://www.ocufa.on.ca

Contrary to what Dr. Henry Friesen (and other research
administrators) are saying publicly, there are far better and more efficient ways to
operate the research funding system. It IS
possible to do more and better research with the same overall research budget and to
involve a much larger proportion of Canada's researchers who are now disenfranchised.
Bringing such researchers back into productivity will do more to reverse Canada's "internal brain drain" than any increase in budget without reform
of the system of allocation. The best solution would be both reform and an increase in the
research budget.

However, it will be a
cardinal political mistake to provide extra funding without requesting councils to change
their grant allocation principles and practices.

The
effectiveness of the federal support of academic
research at Canadian universities by the granting
councils is of concern to all Canadians and especially
to the university community. Here we outline the key
issues regarding effectiveness, and express our view
that the research councils need to undergo fundamental
reform. Our focus is mainly on NSERC, since we are more
familiar with it than with the other granting councils.
Nevertheless, we believe that our inferences are (to a
greater or lesser extent) applicable to MRC and SSHRC
as well. NSERC is the largest of the three research
councils, with an annual budget close to $500 million.
Its clientele is mainly 10,000 to 12,000 professors of
science and engineering who are eligible for NSERC
research grants.

THE PROBLEM

Some recent
articles in the public press convey the
impression that the problem is simply government
underfunding of NSERC, MRC and SSHRC. This view is
widely held; it is actively promulgated by the councils
themselves. Recent increases given to the budgets of
the three councils (in the February 1998 Canadian
budget), although generally praised, have been
criticized as "insufficient" doing little more than
restoring funding that was taken away just a few
years ago.

We believe that
the "underfunding" bogie is a "red
herring" that detracts from the real problems with
Canadian university research; it diverts attention
from the inherent flaws in the operations of the
granting councils themselves. We believe that an
overhaul of the research funding system will do more
to restore integrity and effectiveness to Canadian
scientific research, than further infusions of the
Canadian taxpayers' money, whether this be at the
level of 20%, 50%, or even 100% (as has been proposed
recently in the United States).

Without changes to the policies of the councils the
new money will, in our judgement, be used inefficiently,
being channelled preferentially to already well-funded
(often overfunded) researchers. In fact this has actually happened in the case of NSERC; at its meeting
in June the NSERC Council decided to simply do more of the same: a 10% increase across the board (regardless
of actual need) to professors who already hold research grants.

We filed a proposal (proposed jointly by 17 professors)
to NSERC in May that 2% of its total budget (15% of the
$60-70 million of new money) be allocated to give modest
grants averaging $15,000 to some of the 709 applicants
for research grants who were awarded "nil" grants in the
1997-98 grant-awarding process. This proposal was
entitled "Restoring Integrity to the Research Base", a
title that was amply justified by the details and rationale for the proposal. This proposal was deflected
from the NSERC Council to NSERC's Committee on Research Grants and as a consequence it was
rejected with an incoherent pretext that failed to counter our rationale
for the proposal. This deflection and rejection of a very well thought-out proposal exemplifies NSERC's
recalcitrant resistance to change. The 709 "nil" awardees remain de-facto unemployed as research
scientists (notwithstanding substantial salaries to do research), and with the continuation of the climate of
"competition" (for grant money) the coercion on funded professors to produce lots of easily publishable (but
substantially inconsequential) research papers will continue; i.e. the support and promotion of routine
research at the expense of innovations that have far greater potential to benefit Canada and Canadian society.

One might well wonder how such a meritorious proposal
requiring only 2% of NSERC's budget (less than 1/6th of
the new money) could founder? The explanation is
straightforward; the people whom NSERC appoints to
its many committees (including the Committee on Research Grants) are typically professors who hold high (well
above average) research grants. They are instructed (by the NSERC bureaucracy) to be "selective", and since this
'selectivity" has favoured them with big grants, (the
key to advancement in their professorial careers), self- interest motivates them to resist any change to the
system - regardless of the plight of their peers. Thus
academic researchers are pitted against each other in a
struggle for survival as funded researchers, rather than
being encouraged to collaborate as is desirable for the
advancement of science.

The May 1998 proposal to NSERC is only one of many
representations that have been made to NSERC, some of
them dating back to 1984 - only 6 years after NSERC was
formed. These representations have been brushed aside
mindlessly by successive NSERC presidents and other
executive officers. NSERC shields itself from public
discussion of its policies and practices, because continuance of the present system ensures that an
overbloated bureaucracy (with a staff of about 100 clerical jobs, costing about $17 million annually)
maintains its existence, whereas some of the alternatives that have been proposed would result
in substantial staff reductions.

THE HIGH PERCENTAGE OF
"NIL" AWARDS

The core of
NSERC's philosophy (and practice) is the
principle of "selectivity", i.e. the policy of deliberately not funding a significant percentage
of the applicants. This policy was inaugurated by NSERC's first President, Gordon McNabb, apparently to
convince the government that NSERC was "running a tight ship"; i.e. not giving out money indiscriminately.

Ironically this policy has back-fired; in effect (if not in intent) it has been counter-productive of the
research excellence that it was intended to support and promote; by keeping about one-third of our science
and engineering professors unemployed (as researchers), the competition for funding has promoted (among the
funded) "safe" (routine), "productive" (of easily publishable papers) research at the expense of
intrinsically more valuable innovations, that had the potential (among other benefits) to enhance the economy
of Canada as a technically advanced nation.

Twenty years (since NSERC was formed in 1978) is long
enough to prove whether "selectivity" works or not; the
global proof that it has failed is the huge decline in the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar vis-a-vis
other currencies during that 20-year period. Not only has "selectivity" been "effective" in retarding the
Canadian economy, it has also been instrumental in deceiving the Canadian government into believing that
NSERC's funding policy is responsibly discriminatory, and it has also been successful in keeping criticism
from the research community in check; you don't "bite the hand that feeds you", especially when you fear the
threat of being cut off from life-giving funding.

It is important not to confuse NSERC's policy of
selectivity with the weeding out of incompetent proposals; identification of such proposals is a valid
use of peer-review - necessary to circumvent all and sundry from dipping into the NSERC pot. However, it
is clear to anyone even remotely familiar with the Canadian university system, that the high level of
competition for faculty appointments hardly ever results in an "incompetent" being appointed; such
instances are extremely rare and for all practical
purposes can be safely ignored in designing funding
policies. To presume (as NSERC's current funding policy
does) that one-third of all Canadian professors are
incompetent (i.e. deserve no research funding) is a
ludicrous insult to the entire University community.

Some NSERC documents attempt to provide lame excuses
for this high rate of "nil" awards by saying that, in fact, not all those who are given "nil" awards are
"incompetent", but NSERC is "forced" to deny them any funding simply because it does not have enough money to
fund all deserving applicants. This sop to Cerberus is no comfort to the researcher whose graduate students
are unfunded, especially when he/she sees his/her highly funded colleagues "blowing" excess funding on vacation
("conference") trips to Europe and Japan.

The pretext of inadequate overall funding does not hold
water. Of course, NSERC does not have enough money (and likely never will have) to satisfy the overall demand
for funding accumulated in the budgets of all of its grant applications. Researchers can always do more (up
to a point) by hiring more graduate students, technicians
and post-doctoral fellows to do their work for them; one
well-known researcher has had in excess of 15 assistants
working in his laboratory, which is clearly unmanageable
and must result in inefficiency in the form of doubling
and tripling up on specific research projects.

The well-known rule "first dollars are the most efficient"
makes the case for giving (say) $15,000 operating grants
to six qualified experimentalists rather than a single grant of $90,000 to only one of them. This and similar
arguments were recently put forward by several scholars (i.e. see Terence Kealey, "The Economic Laws of Scientific
Research", Macmillan, 1996).

Thus it does not make sense that competent researchers
should be given "nil" grants. All researchers who pass a
basic integrity check (as detailed in our May proposal to
NSERC) should receive a minimal (base) grant to allow them to remain active as researchers. Funding above that
minimal level should be based upon actual need for funds
as assessed by tangible criteria such as the current number of supervised graduate students and the nature of
the research, whereas at present the dollar value of a professor's research grant is "what he/she got last time"
(four years ago) plus or minus up to 50% depending upon
how the biases of the Grant Selection Committee (GSC) feel about the applicant's "prowess" as a researcher.

It should be appreciated that for an active academic researcher, there is an enormous difference between having
even a small grant and having no grant at all. In some areas, especially theoretical and computational, even a
grant as low as $3,000 to $5,000 per year can cover the major portion of research expenses such as computer
hardware and software, attendance at professional meetings, accommodation of short term visitors to enhance
research collaboration, etc. More expensive (and productive) activities include the vital role of
supervising graduate students - at a cost of a minimum of about $10,000 per annum per student.

Furthermore, funding by NSERC (regardless of the dollar
amount) often provides critical leverage for obtaining
non-NSERC funding from provincial and other sources;
"matching grant" programs are now commonplace - in a
society conditioned by reticence to being the first to say: "this is worthwhile, I will support it
unconditionally".

This is not to suggest that all grants should be at the $3,000 to $5,000 level, but to presume (as a recent
NSERC document does) that $10,000 is a "minimally useful grant" is a arbitrary assumption. In reality no amount
of research funding is useless.

NSERC's total budget of $500 million divided by the
number of researching professors (around 12,000) yields
a figure of $40,000 per researcher. This is much more
than some researchers need, and hence there is ample
funding to keep all researchers active while providing
higher levels of funding to those who really need it. At
present, i.e. the awarding of a graduate scholarship
takes no account of whether the supervising professor
already has adequate funds for the support of the student
(from his/her NSERC research grant), and hence
double-funding of the same fiscal need often occurs.

Another blatant example of this double-funding is that
holding a research grant (the most common kind) is a
prerequisite to obtaining a strategic grant (we are unaware of any exceptions); the researcher with both
only has as many hours in the day to do his research (with double-funding) as the "nil" awardee twiddling
his thumbs in idle frustration.

If one asks why NSERC mounts all these programs, the
answer is that they serve to impress the politicians of the federal government with all of the things
("highly qualified personnel" in training, "strategic"
research, "centers of excellence", etc.) that NSERC supports; thus political expediency rather than fiscal
rationality is the framework of NSERC policies and practices.

TOP, BOTTOM, AND MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
RESEARCHERS

What about the
privileged "top" researchers vis-a-vis
the rest of the research community? It is of course a fact of the history of science that some researchers
attain exceptionally high levels of achievement and occasionally receive Nobel prizes and other signs of
public recognition. Canadian Nobel prize winners number about 12 (of whom only four or five remain in Canada);
i.e. one in a thousand (0.1%) of the 12,000 researchers. So most scientists do not fit into this category of
publicly recognized "excellence"; most researchers are simply competent and industrious. Any attempt to
discriminate among the 99.9% majority of run-of-the-mill researchers will yield inconsistencies that reflect the
personal biases of who you ask, and yet it is this
arbitrary and inconsistent form of assessment that NSERC
uses to determine who shall have large grants, smaller
grants, or no grant at all.

Furthermore, even if one could (objectively) distinguish
some researchers as being much better than others, it
does not follow that they need significantly higher funding levels. Funding should be based upon fiscal
need - not upon an egotistical system that equates worth as a researcher with the size of his/her research grant.

In science there is rarely a strong correlation between
the impact of the research and money spent to do it. On
the contrary, too much funding can actually be detrimental
to the research program because it locks in its recipient
into the grantsmanship game of seeking ever more postdocs, who need more money, who increase the productivity of
papers, which increases the value of the grant at the next competition, etc. etc., all done in a mindless cycle based
upon the dictates of money management rather than upon what is scientifically most
interesting and promising.

Science is a highly dynamic and non-linear process. The
pattern of what will have a lasting impact and what is
routine is rarely recognized at the initial stages of the
research. This fact (attested to by many historians of
science) makes a strong case for a more uniform funding
system rather than the currently in-vogue principle of
"selectivity".

Furthermore, new research discoveries can only be firmly
incorporated into the corpus of scientific knowledge if they become part of the on-going research activity of
many members of the scientific community. Even if it were true that there exists a small elite group of scientists
who consistently make the important discoveries, and that
these individuals can be and are reliably detected by the
GSCs, the findings of these elite scientists cannot be
preserved and perpetuated if other scientists are denied
even the minimal funds necessary to carry out what might
be regarded as relatively routine follow-ups of these
important discoveries.

ARBITRARINESS OF THE GRANT AWARDING
PROCESS

The funding
councils are proud of their peer review
process; it is invariably praised as objective, fair and
capable of reliably picking out the "best" researchers
worthy of grants well above the average.

In reality though, peer review has a high margin of error
and its choice of the "best" is often as arbitrary and
subjective as a choice among finalists in a beauty
contest. All that peer review can do with any reasonable
reliability is to identify clearly incompetent or trivial
proposals. (And even here the history of science is
replete with cases of research originally thought to be
wrong or trivial that turned out with hindsight to be
pivotal, and, conversely, with cases of research thought
to be of great importance that turned out to be of no
lasting significance).

What is even more disturbing, is that even within its
presumed terms of reference and limited validity, peer
review at NSERC is applied arbitrarily and inconsistently.
While it is true that copies of each grant proposal are
sent to the applicant's peers - i.e., recognized
researchers in the applicant's field - the GSCs are free
to give whatever weighting they wish to these reviews,
and it is quite common for panels to completely override
the reviewers' opinions or to take account of only those
reviewers who criticize the applicant based upon school
of thought and personal biases against the applicant.
Thus it is typical practice at NSERC that the applicant
who receives mixed peer reports (say, two positive and
one negative) is given a "nil" award, despite the fact
that his or her work clearly has merits, as attested to
by the positive reviews.

NSERC's GSCs operate on the negative Achilles heel
principle of killing any applicant with any, even minor,
discernible weakness, rather than the positive principle
of giving the applicant the benefit of the doubt (since
he/she is the most expert of all in his/her own
particular field) when the external referee reviews are
mutually inconsistent. Furthermore, innovative work
(because it is new and not yet understood by many people)
is more likely to get bad reviews than routine research
whose basis is widely accepted; thus there is a strong
bias in the "selection" process against innovative
research.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

It has been
pointed out by several critics that the fact
that most GSC members are grant recipients themselves
constitutes a fundamental conflict of interest. Recently
NSERC introduced a rule that GSC members whose grants go up for renewal should temporarily
resign from their GSCs. Such a measure (which, in fact, is an implicit recognition by
NSERC that there is a conflict of interest), does not, however, solve the problem in an
effective way. Members of GSCs are well aware of the next time that their own grants will
be up for renewal, and hence their generous treatment of their fellow members is the best
guarantee that they will get equally good treatment next time; the game of "I fund you, you fund me" prevails despite NSERC's
procedures designed to prevent such favouritism.

Moreover, given our above argument that experts are unable to reliably assess which
proposals (disregarding clearly incompetent ones) are likely to yield the most fruitful
findings or the most important scientific advances, a sharp downsizing of the number of "experts" in the system
seems warranted.

It should also be noted that it is very unclear as to how
members of the GSCs are chosen; as far as we can tell (it
is secretive) the process is confined to a closed circle
of highly funded grantees and their friends in the NSERC
bureaucracy. We are unaware of any process by which new
members are democratically nominated and elected by the
academic community; not even their candidacy is known (to allow public discussion and feedback) before they are
actually appointed to Grant Selection and other committees.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY AND
DISCRETIONARY POWERS

Many critics
point out that the secretive nature of the
funding system obviously permits relatively easy
misappropriation of the ideas of grant applicants by
those (i.e., peer reviewers and GSC members) who have
privileged access to their research proposals. Cases of
this kind of academic dishonesty (occasionally reported
in magazines such as "Nature" and "Science") indicate
that exhortations against such practices do not provide
a sufficient safeguard against theft of ideas or data;
you cannot stop a reviewer or a GSC member from absorbing a new idea in a research
application and subsequently developing it into a research project of his/her
own - it is perfectly natural for any scientist to
follow up on any idea that he/she finds interesting
regardless of its source. The applicants whose ideas
are misappropriated in this way often suffer the double
whammy of being robbed of their best ideas and (as
innovative "nil" awardees) of being denied any research
money with which to develop their own ideas themselves.

This fact, as well as other perilous aspects of the
system outlined above, make a strong case for revoking
(or at least putting under tight public control) the
discretionary powers in awarding grants which are vested
with the councils by the government. It seems to us that
the public has a right to know exactly how its tax money
is being distributed to researchers by the federal
granting agencies. Another aspect of the self-preserving
secretiveness of NSERC is that it refuses to publish a
full summary of each grant competition (including
the "nil" awardees); this prevents outsiders from
independently assessing whether the results of the
process appear to be fair or not. The secretiveness
raises the suspicion (as we have indicated above) that
the process is far from being fair (neither fiscally
nor scientifically).

Therefore, we advocate action by the Canadian government to commission an unbridled public enquiry into the
operations of the three research councils (NSERC, MRC and SSHRC), and/or the creation of a public "watchdog" to
monitor the process by which grants are awarded, to question the rationale behind the policies and
administrative decisions of the councils, and to institute
genuine (as opposed to partial and superficial) regular
public accountability of NSERC and the other councils.
Without such a measure we see very little hope that the
operations of the granting councils will be improved on
their own initiative.

CONCLUSION

University
professors are by definition expected to do
teaching and research. They are paid relatively high
salaries for accomplishing precisely this dual task.
Practically any research involves some operating costs.
Hence, any system which denies competent and industrious
professors the opportunity to carry out both parts of
their "job descriptions" is fundamentally defective.

NSERC awards numerous individual research grants in the range of $50,000 to $80,000 per year and at the same time
routinely denies even $3,000 grants to many competent and meritorious researchers on the pretext that there is
"no money" to fund them at any level. In view of this obvious absurdity, claims that the system is "underfunded"
can hardly be taken seriously. Therefore, we see no reason to support the campaign for more money to NSERC until the
above described flaws in the grant distribution system are constructively eliminated. According to our estimates
(above: $40,000 per professor on average), there appear to be sufficient funds currently in the system to provide
all qualified researchers with at least basic, no-frills operating grants so that all qualified researchers can be
productive. Thus, until the policy of base grants to all active researchers is adopted by our federal granting
agencies, the Canadian research community will, in our view, remain disunited, demoralized, and operating far
below its true potential.

------------------------------------------------------

Alexander A. Berezin is a professor in the Department
of
Engineering Physics, McMaster University; Geoffrey Hunter
is a professor in the Chemistry Department, York
University; Joseph J. Pear is a professor in the
Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba; and
Chary Rangacharyulu is a professor in the Department of
Physics, University of Saskatchewan.

I wish to thank you for hearing the important presentation made to
you
by Professors Richard Gordon and Bryan Poulin in December 1999,
pertaining to Bill C-13. I have read the official transcript of the
material they presented, and the discussion, and wish to affirm that
their point of view was valid, well presented and highly relevant to a
great number of scientists in Canada today.

Canada prides itself in its democratic
society and on its ability to
care for the full spectrum of society, including the old, disabled, sick
and unfortunate. Even the homeless on the streets attract much media
attention these days and have generally been offered many safety-nets
such as out-of-the-cold programs, Salvation Army hostels,
etc.

Yet, when it comes to high achieving echelons of scientists, who
spend the first 35 years of their lives in intensive, expensive training
and then in fierce competition for positions, Canada's faulty research
funding system seems to be geared to knocking everyone down who is
deemed to be below the scientific equivalent of Wayne Gretzky!

There are 2 huge problems
with the present
funding system.

It wastes the talents of, and
investment in, large numbers of good scientists
(Canada's shameful internal brain drain).

You see, in hockey, you can tally
up the goals and assists
but in science you
don't know which minds will spawn the next insulin,
or when. It is
frequently said in our Department of Physiology, U of
Toronto (home of Banting and Best and their insulin) that those novice
researchers of long ago would
never
have qualified for funding in
today's tightly controlled environment where those who have get more
thrive, while the have-nots languish. Banting and Best wouldn't stand a chance
these days. Their Vitae would be too short and unimpressive.

To correct the present wasteful, cruel,
unacceptable funding system that
is generous to 20% of Canada's scientists while excluding most of the
rest, the Gordon/Poulin proposal for providing baseline funding for all
research-active and eligible academic medical researchers is highly
recommended.

These researchers will remain subject to ongoing monitoring
and progress reports. Their creative talents will remain at the service
of their country, university and students, and they will likely do much
more for the money than those who have more than they can use
effectively. Most scientists have only a few good ideas to pursue and
are subject to the law of diminishing returns. The so-called
'superstars' getting $300,000/yr for research would
probably deliver no
less value at $150,000, and the residual $150,000 could be spread out among 10 creative scientists so as to keep their bright ideas in play
for the benefit of science and society.

I urge you to honour and implement the
Gordon/Poulin proposal, or
something close to it, because they speak the truth, desire better
things for Canadian science and society, and desire to release and
harness the creative talents of scientists who have been sidelined for
too long.

The only reason you do not hear from hundreds of such
scientists is that they have become discouraged, demoralized and have
given up. They also don't want to attract attention to themselves as
'losers' in a cruel system that recognizes only 'winners', as defined by
these same winners who are in charge of the system!

(Who has been funded for my entire career at U of T,
since 1969, except
for a year or 2, continuing past retirement until mid-2002. Who has
received major industrial funding, but has been deeply distressed for
over 30 years over the enormous amount of time wasted in seeking
funding and at the inequities and stupidities of the system.

I have
observed many highly funded 'superstars' come and go leaving little
behind them and I remain deeply suspicious of such people who believe
they should have it all while they last, leaving nothing for others.

The
funding system must be opened up, streamlined and more evenly shared.
After writing Malice in Wonderland: Research Funding and Peer
Review, J Neurobiology,
14 (2) 95-112, 1983, describing the present system, I
received some 600 passionate letters and cards almost all expressing
approval, convincing me beyond any doubt that the problems were very
real).

To: the Canadian House of Commons Committee on Bill C-13

Re: Bill C-13 - the
Establishment of CIHR
(the Canadian Institutes for Health Research)

From: Professor Geoffrey Hunter, York University, Toronto;

President, Canadian Association for Responsible Research Funding

Date: 27 January 2000

The Purpose

of this letter is to emphasize the need
for an Amendment to this
Bill that is vital to the success of CIHR. The Amendment will mandate CIHR (as a
primary responsibility) to provide baseline funding to all researcher-applicants who
meet its eligibility criteria. This Proposal was presented to the CIHR hearings by Professors Richard Gordon and Bryan Poulin; their dispositions are appended to this
letter. These dispositions presented the results of their research into what it takes to
create innovative discoveries; they have recorded the detailed basis of their inferences
in a scholarly paper which I have studied (Abstract appended).

The experience of successful innovation within the 3M company, at Bell Laboratories,
and in the intramural program of the U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Health), is positive
evidence that significant innovative discoveries occur when all of the researching scientists
are encouraged (through funding and release time from other activities) to investigate
whatever appears to be interesting (typically an unexpected, serendipitous observation as
in the discovery of penicillin).

If you believe in the practical value of scientific inference you will incorporate into
Bill
C-13 Professor Gordon's and Poulin's inferences about what it takes to stimulate
innovation.
It will take some courage to do this, because it is diametrically opposed to the
traditional
MRC and NSERC policies of selecting many of their applications for non-funding. This
"selectivity" is politically and bureaucratically
appealing because it gives MRC and NSERC
officials a feeling of being in control - of keeping a tight rein on the purse-strings to
convince
the Minister that they are disbursing research grants responsibly. However, as John
Polanyi
has said many times:

"You must give the research horse free-rein if
you want it to win the race".

The way to give the health research horse free-rein is to mandate CIHR to provide
baseline grants to all eligible applicants. The details of such
a mandate may be left to the
CIHR Council, but the mandate must clearly define "eligible applicant" as typified by a
University Professor employed to engage in research within a field within CIHR's purview,
and "baseline grant" as about the amount of money required for a Professor to
direct the
work of one graduate student (about $10,000 per annum).

2. The CONTEXT
of Bill C-13

Scientific investigation has led
to advances in knowledge which have been applied to
enhance people's lives. This process began about 400 years ago and has continued at an
accelerated pace during the 1900s. The prospect is that it will continue indefinitely, and
the
Canadian Government rightly regards the provision of public funding for scientific research
and technological
development as
a top priority (note the distinction between R and D).

Public funding of R&D has been a policy of the Canadian Government throughout the
latter part of the 20th century, and the CIHR proposal is one of several specific
initiatives in
recent years. One view is that these initiatives are an appropriate response to changing
needs
and circumstances, but they also raise questions about why previously enacted policies
have
proven to be less than completely satisfactory ? It is important to find the answers to
these
questions so that the causes of failure in past policies can be avoided in the future.

This scenario of the intent of a enacted policy not being fully realized in its effects,
must be
familiar to seasoned members of the House of Commons; it is easy to compile the objectives
of new legislation  much harder to determine how to achieve those objectives.

3. The Crucial NEED for
the Amendment

The Canadian Association for
Responsible Research Funding (CARRF) was formed in
1993/94 by professors of (mainly) science, engineering and medicine, who had independently
realized that the selection of NSERC, MRC and SSHRC, grant applications for funding based
upon peer-review was counter-productive of the research discoveries that this procedure
was
supposed to accomplish; a case of the effect of a policy being the opposite of its intent.

As it stands Bill C-13 will tacitly accept this common practice of the research councils
as
the basis upon which CIHR will distribute its available funding, and hence members of
CARRF
anticipate (the proof is the scientific study by Richard Gordon and Bryan Poulin) that the
CIHR
(like some other recent initiatives) will be a dismal failure.

This is why our Amendment
to Bill C-13 is vital to the successful accomplishment of the Government's intent in
creating the CIHR.

4. Political
Motivations and the Bureaucratic Prerogative

Selectivity of grant applications
for funding or non-funding is ostensibly rational: not all
research work produces new knowledge with useful applications, and who else is better
fitted to judge which applications are more worthy of support than others, than scientific
experts engaged in research themselves ?

Selectivity and Peer-Review are politically pleasing because they create the impression
that the Granting Agency (NSERC, MRC, SSHRC) is being very responsible by selecting
applications for funding, rather than simply handing out money indiscriminately; the
selection
process appears to be a procedure for ensuring that the taxpayer's money is well-spent.

The selection process also gives the granting agency a sense of doing worthwhile work.
Several thousand applications (in multiple copies), a score of peer-review committees
(each
with a dozen or so members), create the need for a substantial bureaucracy ostensibly bent
upon making the right decisions about which applications to fund.

Selectivity by peer-review is
based upon the fallacy that peers (experts doing similar
research) can objectively determine the worthiness of each applicant and proposal. The
reality is that what each expert deems to be worthy of support is determined mainly by
what interests this particular expert; a proposal that enhances the expert's own work
readily
receives endorsement, whereas new ideas are disparaged with scepticism. It is, after all,
a competition for survival as funded researchers; the expert privileged to determine who
survives and who does not, naturally favours his own survival over that of his competitors
who threaten his existence with radical ideas.

A case in point was cited by Daniel Osmond (Professor of Physiology, University of Toronto) in the CBC Quirks and Quarks program ("The Science Game", broadcast February
15, 1992) in which a young medical researcher's application for funding to MRC was turned
down because the Peer-Review Committee decided that the Proposal "wouldn't work".
During the 6-months that MRC takes for its annual grant-giving exercise, the young
researcher
proved (in the laboratory) that his idea did work. Regardless (and without recourse) he
received the death sentence of the "nil" award, leaving him without any operating
funds with
which to continue his research. This is just one example (of many) of the killing of
creativity
by peer-review.

In that same CBC broadcast (available on cassette tape from the
CBC) Richard Gordon
said:

"The peer-review system is one of the last
bastions of slander
and libel that is still legal",

and he might have added
that the victims of that slander and libel have no effective recourse
against it, for the perpetrators are protected with anonymity by the granting agency, and
once unfunded the victims are deemed (by their peers and by the granting agencies) to be less
excellent than the highly funded grantees who sit on the peer-review committees, and hence
their complaints are typically brushed aside by callous bureaucrats whose raison d'etre
is the
perpetuation of the agency that employs them.

This pervasive situation has earned the agencies a reputation for promoting dishonesty and
corruption (conduct incongruous with the scientific principle of objective truth); the
peer-review
committees are widely perceived to be part of an incestuous, self-serving network
otherwise
known as "the old boys
club".

6. Perversion of
Scientific Research by Selective Funding

All the agency hype about "excellence" disguises the reality of selective
funding; that it is a
witch hunt comparable with the Spanish Inquisition, in which the conformists survive
(typically
with a 4-year grant) while their victims (the agency insists that there be a substantial
percentage
of victims) are sacrificed on the holy altar of excellence with a "nil" award. This climate of
repression (peer review has been equated with repressive bigotry) distorts the whole
process
of doing research; the professor's primary motivation is to stay funded, and hence his/her
choice
of research project is directed towards producing results that are readily publishable in
respectable (i.e. conservative) refereed journals - the best insurance against the "nil"
award.

Thus
research becomes Grant Driven, Grant Limited (the grant is fixed for 4 years), and
(most pertinently) Grant Seeking; curiosity about the nature of things becomes secondary
to
the motivation to maintain funding. Money becomes the end rather than the means. Fixed
funding encourages routine productivity of research results - adding to the pile of data
without
being concerned about innovative insights.

The graduate students and post-docs who are
employed to produce this routine data
attest to the boring nature of this so-called "research" 
they choose to work for the professors who base "successful"
careers on routine research because these are the professors who have most of the Research
Grant dollars to pay their stipends. Basic survival (paying student fees
and putting bread on the table) naturally takes precedence over intrinsic scientific
interest. NSERC and MRC applaud (and reward) such prolific producers of routine results
for training many so-called "highly qualified personnel".

7. Productivity
of the Public Investment

First dollars are the most
effective; with a limited budget, each professor must decide
which of his projects to pursue based upon timeliness and promise, whereas a highly-funded
researcher will pursue several projects concurrently (with the aid of paid assistants). It
doesn't
make economic sense to allow some (highly funded) professors to pursue secondary and
tertiary as well as their primary research interests, while others (the "nil" awardees) are
denied the opportunity to pursue even their primary project.

As Bryan Poulin said during the Hearings (appended) nobody (no not even the most expert
and "excellent" peer-reviewer) can predict which
projects are going to lead to important
discoveries, and which will not, and hence overall productivity of innovations is favoured
by
allowing all potentially innovative ideas to be
investigated [hedging one's bets].

The climate of competition (for survival as a funded researcher) encourages "empire
building"; i.e. greed
for ever larger grants with which to hire more assistants (students and
post-docs) some of whose efforts are likely to lead to the publishable results that are
the
key to further success in the competition. This game of "grantsmanship" (akin to the parlour
game of Monopoly) has no ethical legitimacy; more (research, students, post-docs etc)
should not be equated with "excellence", and yet in the mercenary minded milieu of Canadian
society, the pedestrian measure of money (in this context research funding) is too often
equated with prestige as a scientist. MRC officially measures a researcher's "excellence"
by the dollar value of his/her research grants  a monstrous affront to scientific
integrity.

8. Baseline
Grants - an Important First Step towards Ultimate Reform

The Proposed Amendment to C-13 (to
mandate that CIHR disburse baseline grants to
all eligible applicants for funding) is a first step towards putting Canadian Scientific
Research
on the path towards being truly innovative and productive. Yet it is only a first step,
for what
is ultimately needed is a flexible system of funding whereby researchers can request
additional
funds (above the baseline
grant) at any time as needs
and opportunities arise. Such a system
was proposed to the Canadian Government in October 1984 under the title: "Interactive
Financing of University Research" (proposal to
Gordon McNabb, NSERC President and
Tom Siddon, Minister of Science by Geoffrey Hunter). In 1984 the internet was still in its
infancy, but it was possible even then, and today its implementation would be quite easy.
Grant applications for specific line-items such a students stipend or an equipment
purchase
should be responded to within 24 hours. Such an immediately responsive funding system will
be a tremendous stimulus to innovative research, because it will switch the research
climate
from being Grant Driven, Grant Limited and Grant Seeking, to scientific idea and
opportunity
driven. It will also end the huge waste of both money and talent that is endemic in grants
that
are fixed for 4 years.

Grants that are fixed for (typically) 4 years waste both money and talent; inevitably
some researchers have more money in their research grant budgets than is currently needed,
while others have insufficient funds; the former obviously is a waste of money while the
latter
is a waste of motivated talent.

Providing money to sustain research when and where it is currently needed is the key
towards creating a stimulating and creative environment for the pursuit of science; e.g.
in
1947/48 two electrical engineers (Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams) were engaged in
trying to build the world's first stored-program computer; they were given carte
blanche
by their Minister of Science (whatever money they needed to assemble the thousands of
electrical components), and in June 1948 they were successful in running their first
program.
This event marked the beginning of the computer revolution that in the year 2000 is
pervasive
and ubiquitous. It happened because those engineers were freed from concern about funding,
and hence they could spend their time thinking about the scientific problem that they were
trying to solve.

Bryan Poulin refers to the low morale that is widespread in Canadian University faculties
of science, engineering and medicine. This low morale is generated by the climate of
competition for research funding that stems directly from the Research Councils' policy of
Selectivity. Even people in the same department (some of whom are funded while others are
not) live in a climate of competition, enmity and jealousy; this is antagonistic to the spirit of collaboration and
cooperation that is essential to the enthusiastic pursuit of scientific knowledge and
understanding.

It is plainly stupid to employ professors (with typical salaries of $50,000 - $100,000)
and at the same time deny them a basic operating budget with which to pursue the Research
that they are expected to do. The primary concern when a professor is hired is his/her
potential to do research (teaching ability is taken for granted - no teacher training is
required).
As professors who were hired in the 1960s and 1970s retire, their replacements are highly
selected (typically 1 appointment from 50-100 applicants). All of these highly selected
researchers deserve some baseline funding to allow them to maintain their research
programs.

Geoffrey Hunter,
Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto.
President: Canadian Association for Responsible Research Funding.
Research on "The Nature
of the Photon and the Electron"
currently funded by NSERC at $18,000 per
annum (1999-2003).
email: ghunter@yorku.ca

We'll move on now to Dr.
Richard Gordon from the Canadian Association for
Responsible Research Funding, again from the University of Manitoba. Dr. Gordon,
please.

Dr. Richard Gordon (Vice-President, Canadian Association for Responsible
Research Funding; Professor of Radiology and Adjunct Professor of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba):

Thank you. My name
is Richard Gordon. I'm vice-president of the Canadian Association
for Responsible Research Funding, which is known as CARRF. I'm a full tenured professor
of radiology and also an adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at the
University of Manitoba.

It is important for you to know with whom you are dealing, so I'm going to give you a
little bit of my background. My undergraduate degree is in mathematics and my Ph.D. is in
chemical physics.

I
have two careers. In the field of embryology and evolution, I have just published this
two-volume tome, which you may pass around if people want to look at it. The title is The
Hierarchical Genome and Differentiation Waves. It shows how much of the mystery of the
growth of embryos can be explained in terms of physics combined with genetics. It also
explains how evolution has produced ever-more-complex organisms, leading eventually to
human beings. It explains how an embryo forms many kinds of cells from one egg cell, and
how this is likely to open up a new pharmaceutical industry.

My second career is in medical imaging. In this I have concentrated for the past 23 years
on the detection of breast cancer. I'm now working with a company with which I have
designed a breast scanner that should detect small breast tumours before they spread. It
will
then zap them with X-ray beams. If it works as planned, it will cure this disease. (I hope you
will put a rider on the CIHR bill to give me the $3 million we need to build and test this
prototype.)

CARRF is a gadfly organization of about forty professors spread across Canada, including
five from Quebec. The president is Geoff Hunter, a chemist at York University. Alex
Berezin,
a physicist at McMaster, is our executive secretary. Dan Osmond, a physiologist at the
University of Toronto, is also a vice-president. About ten people in other countries, in
the
National Cancer Institute of Canada, and in the Canadian Federation of Biological
Societies
listen in to our e-mail discussions and sometimes contribute their opinions. We have
published
many articles and even a forthcoming book. I brought a list of our publications, if anyone
wants to look at it. We have been featured on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks twice.

Some of us have been haranguing MRC and NSERC since 1983. In 1995 we incorporated
in preparation for a case of one our members against NSERC in the Federal Court of Canada.
We lost that one, but not our hope of someday reforming the grant system.

Our opponents will portray us as losers. I have had fourteen federal grants myself, and
the cumulative value of all my grants exceeds $1 million, which is not bad for someone who
is primarily a theoretician. Many CARRF members are presently federally funded.

What do
CARRF members want? Simply put, we want all university professors who
are paid part of their salaries to do scientific research and want to pursue it to be able
to
actually do some. The present federal granting system gives all of the money to a fraction
of the scientists, and the rest get nothing - literally nothing.

A
survey done by Joe Pear and me in Manitoba last January showed NSERC funded
50% of their targeted academic scientists and MRC funded only 21%. Bryan Poulin, who
you'll hear from next, and I have documented how innovative organizations give all of
their
scientists some time and money to play around with crazy ideas. A few succeed, and we
have revolutions in industry, in health, and in our daily lives.

No one can predict in advance
which scientists will have the ideas that work. That
includes scientists. MRC can't make these predictions, nor can CIHR. MRC and CIHR are
stuck in a rut, wanting to peer-review every idea to death, no matter how fresh and
untested.
They need your help
to get out of this rut. Without federal legislation via an amendment
to the CIHR bill, Bill C-13, nothing will change. But if Parliament were to legislate that
a
fraction of the CIHR budget be shared equally amongst all health scientists, we predict a
very
substantial increase in Canadian innovation. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much for those comments.
We're certainly interested in your
point of view, and you've expressed it, so we're grateful for that. We'll move on to
Lakehead University. Dr. Bryan Poulin is an associate professor there.

Thank you very much.
Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Health,
it's a pleasure to address you.

I
don't come here presenting myself as knowing much about medical research, but over
the last fifteen years I have looked at the innovation process. I did a masters degree in
that
and followed through with a doctoral degree on effective organizations and how to improve
their morale, which was another point brought up by Dr. Glavin.

We believe morale is a very important issue in any kind of research. One of the reasons
why I got together with Dr. Richard Gordon is that I told him there were instances of the
best organizational practices in which the support was radically different from what he
was
telling me occurred at MRC and the new organization that was going to replace it.

I
told him about 3M, which was primarily a commercial organization giving some free rein
to scientists, inventors, and engineers at the idea stage. We used 3M as a baseline case
because 3M is primarily a commercial organization, although I accept the point that we're
not really looking at commercialization as a priority.

My definition of innovation is somewhat different from what I've heard from Dr. James
Turk, but it has some parallels. In my view, the innovation process starts with an idea,
tests
out that idea through the feasibility stage, and eventually leads to commercialization.
We're
not suggesting that anything like the majority of the effort would go to
commercialization.
Most should be in the idea stage and in the testing stage. That's the mandate of
university
research, medical research, and research of any kind. To my mind, it's publicly funded.
However, it seems to me that the response of the ineffective organizations is to try to
simplify
things beyond the complex nature that exists.

Such simplification is actually dangerous. The world is complex, research of any type is
complex, and the phenomena we deal with are complex. Even the three-stage model that
we've looked at is a simplification, but it's not a gross simplification in which you
treat all
the stages equally and peer-review everything to death before things get started. What
we're
saying here is that, at the idea stage, there is no way you can tell a priori whether an
idea is
going to reach the commercialization stage, nor is there any way that there are peer
reviews
in any sense of the term.

Somebody having a new idea usually is considered, frankly, crazy. The person who
invented or looked at electric phenomena in human species was accused of trying to play
with frogs to make them dance. The thing is that when we do curiosity-driven research,
it is very difficult...in fact, it is impossible to see where it's going to lead. Oftentimes in
innovation, a real innovation comes from somebody who's aware enough to see something
different and whose mistake can lead to the proper solution. Therefore, it's easy to
critique
something because of supposed errors. It's those very errors and the initiative in
following
the curiosity that often lead to a breakthrough solution.

This is what we're proposing. We're proposing that we follow the innovation
process and set in place something that actually mirrors that process. Chaos ought
to reign in the idea stage. Then, over time, as it reaches the feasibility and
commercial stage, we rein in the chaos. We don't rein in the chaos before it even
gets started.

That's what I see as so fundamentally flawed with the MRC's approach to peer-reviewing
everything, especially the scientists who are going to have the breakthroughs, who are not
going to be part of the old boys' network, who are not going to be part of excellence
defined
in terms of having received grants. Excellence ought to be the impact of one's career,
not a particular stage of it, and especially not the beginning stage.

Let's
go back to morale. When we do things in a way that reflects reality, people get
excited and empowered. The morale is low now, but I believe it's higher because we expect
changes in the new CIHR. If those changes are not made in a meaningful way, that morale
will collapse to the floor again.

Richard and I are suggesting that what we need to do is mandate a little bit of seed
money to the scientists to whom we already pay $60,000 and $70,000 to sit in their
chairs with no equipment. We need to give them a little bit of the resources needed to
get started. We can then have the ideas come forward, and the best ones can be vetted
in a little bit more formal way through the feasibility stage. Then, in the
commercialization
stage, which is a very small part of the effort, we can get into very rigorous peer
review.
In fact, it will be not only peer review; it most likely will be industrial review. Thank
you
very much.

The Chair: Thank you for those comments, Dr.
Poulin.

APPENDIX 2 - ABSTRACT
of:

"How
to Organize Science Funding: The New Canadian Institutes
for Health Research (CIHR), an Opportunity to Vastly Increase Innovation".

Why
are Bell, 3M and the intramural program at NIH (US National Institutes of Health) so
successful at inspiring innovation? How does what MRC (Medical Research Council of Canada)
is doing compare and, in fact conflict with that? Is the existing and proposed
structure/culture of CIHR (planned to replace MRC) doomed to produce little innovation
from the outset?

Our examination leads to
recommendations for a funding system and organizational structure for CIHR: minimal
structure with baseline funding at the initial, idea stage (30-40% of budget); more formal
structure and competitive funding at the feasibility stage (50-60%); and matching
industrial grants for the commercialization stage (10%). Developing countries inaugurating
their science funding that follow our recommendations may take off in science well beyond
present expectations.

Opening remarks by Donald R. Forsdyke of
the Department of Biochemistry, Queens University to the Parliamentary
Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, relating to
its study of the granting processes of the three federal research
granting agencies. Ottawa 29th November 2001[2
months after the 11th September attack on the World Trade Center]

Those who
are perceived as having attained excellence in
a given field are most likely to be asked for advice on that field. They
become labelled as "experts," and governments, assuming their
advice to be the best available, call upon them to testify. If the
subject were ice-hockey or ballet, perhaps Wayne Gretsky or Evelyn Hart
would be sitting here. It follows that, if the processes by which
the Gretskys and Harts become labelled as experts were flawed, then
government would be less likely to get the best advice. Because
ice-hockey players and ballet dancers are in the public domain, their
excellence can be evaluated both by their peers, and by the public at
large. However, when the subject is scientific research, this does not
apply. We depend entirely on some form of peer review to judge
excellence, and this process alone defines those who will be
considered "experts." If the peer-review process were flawed
then the Canadian taxpayer would be footing the bill not only for
inferior research, but also for inferior advice.

While we might, despite inferior
research, survive in the short term by exploiting the originality and
creativity of scientists in other countries, it is certain that, even in
the short term, we will not survive in the 21st century with
inferior advice. And I am not just talking about the gross domestic
product and the quality of life. I am talking about survival itself!
Problems such as AIDS, bioterrorism, genetically-modified food, mad cow
disease and the poisoning of the biosphere, demand advice from those
best equipped to address them.

Forty years of involvement in
biomedical research in the UK and Canada have led me to believe that
peer-review as currently practiced is highly flawed. Government and,
yes, the research councils themselves, are not getting advice from the
brightest and the best. Indeed, a person incorrectly designated as
"expert" is more likely to incorrectly designate others as
"experts;" these, in turn, will incorrectly designate others,
and so on. Thus, there is a built-in multiplier that threatens to send
the entire system spiraling out of control. From some of the events we
read of daily in our newspapers (Olivieri, Koren, Grinstein, Healy,
Cuticchia, etc., some of these names have become household words) it
might be inferred that the system is already out of control (1).
Recent happenings at the University of Toronto have alerted the general
public, which is now coming to suspect that the system is
broken. If
there is ever to be a time for discarding the honeyed assurances of the
Neville Chamberlains and listening to the Churchills, it is now!

I experienced the blitz in London
during World War II. My father was torpedoed three times in the
Atlantic. I graduated in medicine at London University, and gained a
Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge University. The great dangers
threatening our civilization have seldom been far from my consciousness.
Some of my first publications in the UK were in the journal of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies. Here in the 1960s I
warned of covert terrorism and of the dangers of biological warfare (2).
When I arrived at Queens University in 1968 I envisaged that I would
be able to balance the various demands on my time and, while continuing
my research program and general university duties, would be able to
continue developing my expertise on strategic matters. Thus, if called
upon, I would be in a position to advise government. To my amazement, I
found I had, like Alice in Wonderland, landed in a strange Mad Hatters
world dominated by a peer-review system which has been described by
Nobelist Joshua Lederberg as having become "vicious beyond
imagination" and by Nobelist Phillip Sharp as having taken on a
"mask of madness" (3). It soon became evident that I would
need to attend to serious immediate problems in my own back yard rather
than keep myself informed on bioterrorism.

I had anticipated that I would be
writing one grant application every 5 years, so that over a research
career of 40 years I might have to write 8 applications. Instead, I
found that I was sometimes writing as many as 8 applications a year!
This was not exceptional. In a recent article geological engineer Kurt
Kyser of Queens University estimates he spends a third of his time
writing grant applications and submits up to 6 proposals a year (4). The
taxpayer is footing the bill for all this! If you found that people you
had hired to add a garage to your house were spending a third of their
time playing cards you would loudly protest. The notion that writing a
grant application is a useful exercise that helps an applicant sort out
his/her ideas is false. Grant writing is an exercise in marketing and
politics. It is playing cards. It has nothing whatsoever to do with
creative research. Canada cannot afford to waste the time of its
talented people in this way.

In fact, the first rule of writing
grant applications is not to be creative. As anyone can learn by reading
accounts of great discoveries in the past, novel ideas are often
difficult to articulate and difficult to understand. To put an original
idea on a grant application is akin to professional suicide. People
suffering the affliction of originality must either bring this deviant
trait to order, or get out of scientific research. It might be thought
that current peer review procedures, despite their flaws, are better
than simply allocating funds by tossing a coin. But coin-tossing at
least gives excellence a fighting chance. In fact, the current system is
worse that coin-tossing since it actively selects against
excellence
(Click Here).

In general and thankfully there
are some exceptions we fund those who have found a safe academic
haven by seeking more of the obvious. In the 19th century safe havens
were found by describing new species of plants and animals, not by
supporting Mendel and Bateson who were struggling to create the science
of Genetics upon which much of the progress of 20th century
bioscience came to depend. Today, the struggle is the same. Safe havens
are found by describing genes preferably those with some disease
connection and of interest to pharmaceutical companies not by trying
to understand how our genomes work through the new science of the 21st
century Bioinformatics. Until such an understanding is obtained,
"quick-fix" attempts at gene therapy may open unforeseen
Pandoras boxes.

I do not just carp. I have come up
with an alternative to the current peer review system which I call
"bicameral review." Over past decades I have communicated this
in briefs to research council executives. Much of it has been published
as journal articles. Several of these articles have been collected
together in a book entitled Tomorrows Cures Today? How to Reform
the Health Research System (5). I have had a web-page on peer-review
up and running for over 2 years (6). I am a founding member of the
Canadian Association for Responsible Research Funding (CARRF). Reading
transcripts of previous meetings of this committee I frequently found
the remark, usually from Agency executives, that "the current peer
review system, like democracy, is a terrible system, but it is the best
we have." This is not true. An alternative, bicameral review, has
been on the table for at least a decade!

What is bicameral review? As the name
suggests, there are two reviewing bodies, not one. One body is a
committee of peers, as in the present system. The other is the Grant
Agency itself. The information needs of the two bodies are different.
This is because the grant decision-making process has two components,
relating to the person, and to the
project. There are just
two questions: 1. Should this person be funded? 2. How much
funding does his/her project need? Under bicameral review the
first decision is made by the committee of peers, who only review the
applicants track record, not the applicants proposed
project. The second decision is made, in house, by specialists in the
funding agency who, with respect to budget justification, only review
the applicants proposed project, notthe applicants track
record.

The underlying premise of bicameral
review is that, for reasons spelled out above, evaluation of proposed
research projects is highly error-prone. As any Bay Street analyst will
tell you, the golden rules for operating in error-prone environments are
just two. 1. Use only the most objective parameters. 2. Hedge your bets.
In the context of bicameral review these rules translate into getting
the committee of peers only to evaluate track record, and the grant
agency to allocate funds on a sliding scale.

Track record is assessed as a ratio of
achievement to funds received. Researchers are made accountable. From
those to whom much has been given, much should be expected. Armed with
the peer-review ratings, the grant agency then decides what funds are
needed and, following the hedging principle, disburses them on a sliding
scale. Those at the top of the scale get 100% of what they are deemed to
need. Those just below the top get, say, 80%. This progresses to the
bottom where the applicant may get only 10% of what he/she needs.

That in a nutshell is bicameral
review. There are many details which are dealt with elsewhere (5,6).
With bicameral review there would be more justice than under the present
system. Now there is a sharp cut-off line. Those whose rating is a point
below the line receive the same capital sentence as those at the
bottom of the rating scale. Under the sliding-scale proposal, the
"punishment" fits the "crime." Although there are
those who will swear that their research programs will collapse unless
they receive at least $100,000 a year, in fact,
quantity of funds
is most likely to determine the rate of progress,
not whether any
progress is possible at all.

I can attest to this. I managed for
many years with one technician who resisted the lure of more
stably-funded laboratories and continued to work, sometimes for only
half a day a week. We always made progress, albeit sometimes slow.
Despite meager funding, I have published around 100 papers relevant to
AIDS, cancer, and immune system diseases. In the nineties my
bioinformatic analyses of genomes led to a new understanding of the
problem Charles Darwin described as "the mystery of
mysteries," the origin of species. In a recent book I have
identified Darwins close research associate, George Romanes, as one
of Canadas unsung heroes (7).

A final word. Events of the last few
decades have shown that small groups, with an imaginaryor
realsense of injustice and a little technical know-how, can disrupt peace in
powerful ways. As antidote to imaginaryinjustice we must bolster
our mental health system. But the only antidote to realinjustice
is to ensure that such injustice does not occur. You will recall the
Fabricant case in 1992 when a professor went on a shooting rampage at
Concordia University. Here the level of real injustice was sufficient to
push over the brink someone who, in other circumstances, might have
behaved sanely. We have been foot-dragging too long. Unless the problems
of peer-review injustice are properly addressed we may find that the
present anthrax scare is but the grim harbinger of even worse tragedies.

(1) Thomson, J., Baird, P., Downie, J. (2001) Report
of the Committee of Inquiry on the case involving Dr. Nancy Olivieri,
The Hospital for Sick Children, the University of Toronto, and
Apotex Inc. CAUT, Ottawa.

In June 2002 the above
Standing
Committee on Industry, Science and Technology published a report
entitled:

Canada's
Innovation Strategy: Peer Review and the Allocation of Federal Research
Funds.

The Chairman (Walt
Lastewka, M.P.) opened by noting
that "A wide range of views ... was heard; the Committee believes
that this report captures the essence of those views."

While some of my views were indeed accurately captured (p. 59),
the evidence was incorrectly (see main Peer Review Web-Page) dismissed
as "anecdotal" (p. 59).

Furthermore, it was suggested (p. 60) that under the system of bicameral
review there was an "absence of technical experts to evaluate the
proposed research." This was untrue. The technical experts were not
absent. They were very much present. Their roles were to evaluate
track-record, a task demanding all that their expertise could provide.

Sadly omitted was my most important point, - that
our entire system of government,
run by non-specialist politicians, depends on input from experts, and
hence, is critically dependent upon the correct working of the system
which designates individuals as "experts." We need the most
expert "experts." Quite predictably, the Report ended up, yet again, rubber-stamping the
status quo.